Chapter 1  Mallee Roots

The freeway sang, my heart swam. Ahead lay 2500 kilometres, the Great Dividing Range, and the trip of a lifetime. We would travel half a continent, Juliette pillion on my red 1981 Moto Guzzi V50II. We would see more of Australia in a leisurely week than most people see in a lifetime. We would see sub-tropical and temperate rainforest, the wine areas of the Riverland and the Hunter Valley, 1000 kilometres apart, we would cross one of the world's greatest and longest rivers near its mouth and again near its source, we would see the country's heartland and its lesser organlands as well. We would see the parts of Australia's great wilderness, from the Southern Ocean to the Pacific. But the first stage involved negotiating semi-desert.

South Australia

Adelaide, capital of South Australia and our starting point, sits in an artificial oasis. To the north is Sturt's Stony Desert, the Tirari Desert, the Great Victoria Desert, the Simpson Desert, and the Strzelecki Desert. The State of South Australia covers almost a million square kilometres but 99 percent of the State's population lives below the 32 parallel. Above that line is the great emptiness where just one per cent of the population lives in about two-thirds of the total area of the State - an area larger than Germany and France combined. To Adelaide's west is similarly dry country extending to the Nullarbor Plain, over the Hills to the east no surface water flows, and to the south is the saltiness of the Southern Ocean. Much of South Australia receives near zero rainfall. Adelaide's immense thirst - the city has more than a million inhabitants - is quenched via pipeline; almost all its water is pumped from the only significant river in the State, the Mighty Murray, 84 kilometres to the east. Were it not for this steel and concrete artery the city would desiccate. Adelaide's annual rainfall is a mere 530 mm, making it the driest capital in Australia. Our route on this first day would take us initially south-east, crossing the Murray at, yes - Murray Bridge - and then westwards through South Australia's mallee country. And further on, to the edge of civilisation, to places where a Cooper's Stout is just a portly maker of barrels.

We left the city and its memories of Christmas present, the V50 running sweetly and fully fuelled. Naturally it was fully loaded as well, with a dozen maps, a 35mm camera and a video camera as well, mobile phone recharger, wet-weather clothing, thermals, spare jeans, sneakers, too many T-shirts, a towel each, and even a few pairs of clean undies. In throw-over panniers, tankbag, and on the carry-rack we had tent and sleeping bags, camping mattress and groundsheet, the makings of dinners and breakfasts en route, a billy and frypan, flour and sugarcane syrup for pancakes, half a dozen 200ml cartons of longlife milk, rye bread and cheese, dried fruit and tinned sardines, thermos, coffee, tea, and sugar, Scotch Finger biscuits, and half a dozen hard-boiled eggs. We also carried six kilos of tools (including a tension wrench!) and a few spare parts like nuts and washers and of course the workshop manual. The tires would last until Brisbane, but the Scotch in my hip flask would not.

All this had been put together in the two days we had to plan the trip.

With the revs at 5800 per minute, and the odometer at two kilometres a minute, it was up over the Adelaide Hills and into the flatlands. Dun coloured sheep in dun coloured fields picked at stubble which hadn't seen rain for a month. Exposed fault lines showed where ancient seabeds had uplifted, folded, and buckled. Within an hour we saw the river flats of the Mighty Murray, and then the river itself flowed far below our wheels as we crossed the high Swanport Bridge.

Here was evidence of how quickly hominoids have changed both landscape and riverscape. There was a time, as recently as 1850 when the first European settler arrived (his name was Edwards, and Murray Bridge was originally called Edward's Crossing), when the river flats in this area were graced with tall River Red Gums (eucalyptus camaldulensis), which grow up to 50 metres high. The Red Gum is the most widely distributed of all eucalypts, and occurs on or near almost all of the seasonal watercourses in the arid and semi-arid areas west of the Great Divide. Its timber is hard and durable and resistant to termites. Early colonialists felled many Red Gums which were rough-hewn into buildings, and the milled timber was also used in the keels, decking, and superstructures of the great paddle-wheelers which plied this river and its tributaries, a watery highway connecting the remote and isolated 19th-century grain and wool-growing settlements with each other and, eventually, with coastal ports, sailing clippers, and Mother England.

But the paddle-steamers needed steam for the paddles, and this came from furnaces stoked with red gums too. Up and down 2000 kilometres of river, the gums were cut down and split, left to season under the sun, and cremated in iron boilers. The steamers' appetite for wood was seemingly insatiable. It was only the coming of railways (also steam-powered but burning coal) which ended the era of the paddle-wheeler and saved the last stands of riverine red gums.

But then came the irrigation dams, weirs, and locks. No longer do snows melting on the Alps' western slopes result in annual summer floods. Red gums in areas like South Australia where the rainfall is less than 250 mm a year must rely on seasonal flooding. Trees spared the axe fell victim to salinity and thirst.

Finally, the worst indignity. River flats were deliberately cleared of trees and replaced with pastures of North American grass, and grazing bovines from Europe were introduced because of their peculiarly prolific lactation. While Australia possesses some of the world's finest dairying country in parts of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, South Australia's insanity means the Murray River is unnecessarily sucked dry to irrigate pastures for Frisian and Jersey herds.

On such prosperity was the township of Murray Bridge built. It grew to now be the South Australia's largest river town. But the dual-carriage South-east Freeway on which we were travelling by-passes the city of Murray Bridge, and the running was easy.

Talem Bend, the mighty Murray's last bend before it slides into Lake Alexandrina.

By Talem Bend, where a small township is built on the eastern bank of the Murray's last bend before it slides into Lake Alexandrina and the sea, we wanted a little green grass for ourselves. It was lunchtime, so we pulled over on the riverbank in the soft sunshine and picnicked on soft drink and pies while we watched pelicans drift in the lazy current, and the cattle trucks being ferried across the river to the markets. We felt sorry for the innocent brown-eyed cargo, and put our calf-skin leathers on again.

And we turned east, onto the Ouyen (sometimes called the Mallee) Highway.

Mallee

Now we were entering Mallee country. Bordering the enormous desert regions in the south of the Australian continent is a belt of country characterised by, and named after, dwarf eucalypts called mallees, which thrive on the salty alkaline soils. Mallees are not confined to a single group of eucalypts but appear in several groups not closely related. These trees have a number of slender stems sprouting from a shallow-growing thickened woody rootstock. New stems may sprout repeatedly from the buds concealed in the woody mass. Mallees can therefore survive drought and fire.

But they cannot survive bulldozers. Beginning in the 1920's, and as recently as the 1980's, vast tracts of arid Australia were cleared of the once-extensive mallee forests by pairs of bulldozers working in tandem, dragging between them a chain on which rolled a huge iron ball, flattening all before it. This alone wouldn't have been enough to permanently kill the mallees, because the rootstock could sprout even if upturned. So the very roots themselves were then grubbed out, and sold in Melbourne and Adelaide as prized firewood.

Sheep now graze where mallee grew, and ploughs have scattered the thin topsoil to the wind. Narrow strips of original vegetation still line road verges but the fauna has all but vanished. Most birds and mammals cannot live in a 50 metre-wide ribbon of bush, no matter how long that ribbon is, because to hunt and forage they would have to travel many tens of kilometres. And reptiles make one or two lucky highway crossings before they become squashed carrion for the Australian raven, the largest member of the crow family in Australia, whose bill can easily penetrate the carcasses of animals up to the size of a kangaroo. Their aah-aah-aahaah call, the last note drawn out and dropping in pitch and intensity, is one of the most commonly-heard bird calls in eastern Australia. This raven and its relative the so-called grey currawong (which is actually black with a white underside on its rump) are now the most visible birds of the Mallee.

Fortunately there are two or three conservation parks around Lameroo, an undistinguished town of 600 people where we had our first coffee stop of the journey. As we savoured the caffeine hit from the vacuum flask in the shady town park, we noted that the town's top courtier, Philamena's Dress and Balloon Shop, was looking deflated, the district Progress Association office had closed, and the barber had locked his door. Life is not as fast in Lameroo as once it was.

But we were fast. This is magnificent country for riding. South Australia is generally a plain with 80 per cent of it no more than 250 metres above sea level, so we had no mountains to cross, and no windy roads on which to fang. But it's easy to travel - the cruise control set to 120 kilometres an hour, almost no traffic, and what there was of that was not of the constabulary nature.

Small settlements like Sherlock, Peake, Jabuk, Geranium, Parrakie, Wilkawatt, and Parilla - each just a service station and a store, sometimes with a pub - slipped by. Pinnaroo, just east of Lameroo on the Ouyen Highway, was settled in 1904, and by 1908 its boom was already going bust. The area is still a big producer of barley, oats, and wheat, and as we rode huge silos would peer at us over the horizon, and others, equally tall, would suddenly appear almost as we were on them - silos in towns with no people. How different it all was when the grain was bagged, when gangs of men manually loaded the sewn bags onto steam trains. Whole communities in this region have now disappeared, abandoning homes to their now-cold hearths, schools to their fine white chalk dust, churches to their unfulfilled prophesies. Even quite substantial roadside homesteads were boarded up when landowners moved away. Once it was rare for a farmer to be able to look from horizon to horizon and call all that he saw his own; now some of the Mallee country is owned by city investors who have not personally seen their properties.

The riding was effortless. Juliette makes a fine pillion. I flicked the mirror to see her face. She was smiling. We crossed the State border into Victoria, and had a proost! from the hip flask.

To our north and south were the sand ridges of Victoria's Big Desert, but this centre strip through which we rode is still productive sheep and grain country. At Ouyen we stopped for petrol and a lamb-burger lunch, lay on the grassy footpath, and stretched our muscles. Then through Manangatang and on to Piangil, where oranges and grapes grow lush on irrigation, because again we met the Murray. The river had done a huge, 800 kilometre loop to our north, and here marks the border between Victoria and New South Wales.

We made camp on the riverbank at Piangil, had coffee and a sip of the hip flask for mosquito protection.

We pulled over on the riverbank, put up the tent, lit a little fire, and watched the sunset. In the river shallows, marsh sandpipers and greenshanks waded, birds which breed in Eurasia from Scotland through Siberia, and which spend the northern winter here. Mosquitoes hovered like helicopters, and we were cautious because they can carry some best-avoided diseases like encephalitis, but a little insect repellent kept them away. Plus, I'd also discovered, through experimentation, that they don't like feeding on blood which has an alcoholic content, so we needed a little Scotch as well, just to be on the safe side. The campfire smoke curled around us like a wisp, and the gentle crackle of the flames lit our little tent and the parked motorcycle. To the south the Southern Cross rose, and then to the east the moon came up, and we fell asleep to the cries of the nightbirds. We had done just 500 kilometres on this first day, and we'd enjoyed every one. Adelaide had faded, and tomorrow would bring us to the slopes of the Great Divide. Peace fell over us like a blanket, and kept us warm.


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